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Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it. The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner. A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink. They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.

News

Surma, Web Advocate at Google, recently published a study on the performance of postMessage, the method used by web workers to communicate. Surma concludes that while postMessage comes with some overhead, provided the payload is below a given budget, moving non-UI tasks off the main thread may result in increased overall user-perceived performance.

Rags Srinivas caught up with engineering manager at Netflix, Mikey Cohen, regarding their major re-architecture of their Zuul gateway for microservices. Cohen talks about the journey and walks through the motivation and challenges of this significant effort.

In his presentation "Understanding Hardware Transactional Memory" at QCon New York 2016, Gil Tene introduces hardware transactional memory (HTM). Whereas the concept of HTM is not new, it is now finally available in commodity hardware. The purpose of HTM is to be able to write to multiple addresses in memory in an atomical way so that there cannot be inconsistencies in cooperation other threads.

At CppCon 2014, Herb Sutter gave a talk about lock-free programming in C++ where he provided the fundamental concepts of lock-free programming, and presented three algorithms to show lock-free techniques. Here is a summary of the most relevant points in the talk.

Facebook has been working in the last two years to evolve the architecture of its iOS app with the goal of improving performance, abstractions, and the underlying development model. Adam Ernst and Arl Grant, software engineers at Facebook, explained what issues they had to solve and how they did in a @Scale 2014 talk.

One of the most common misunderstandings in .NET development is the idea that variables of type IEnumerable or ReadOnlyCollection are thread-safe. In order to offer truly thread-safe collections for scenarios where you would be tempted to use IEnumerable or ReadOnlyCollection, Microsoft’s Base Class Library (BCL) team is offering a preview of a new set of immutable collections.

SharpCrafters, makers of the AOP framework PostSharp, have developed a drop-in deadlock detection toolkit. This toolkit works with most standard locking primitives such as Mutex, Monitor, and ReaderWriterLock with only a single line of code added to the project.

The new Async CPT for VB and C# looks like it may actually make it into the core language. But with all the emphasis on multi-core systems, why is Microsoft investing so heavily in syntax for designed specifically for making single-threaded asynchronous programming easier?

Concurrent Basic represents a possible future for Visual Basic. Though based on work done in C# research languages such as Polyphonic C# and C-Omega, Visual Basic was chosen for its inherent predisposition towards declarative programming. The syntax is even inspired by VB’s declarative event handlers.

.NET 4 is adding support for tasks. Tasks are lightweight units of work much like queue work items, but with support for waits, continuations, and futures. Tasks can also support parent-child relationships with waits and cancellations being automatically threaded through them.